Crunchyroll

Satoshi Mizukami's Spirit Circle is about destiny and reincarnation. More meaningfully, it's about forgiveness and compassion --- how to heal your blood rift. It's a series that warns the reader implicitly against binge reading, while also acknowledging that the reader, like the main character, will be way too invested to listen.

When you look at the sheer range and number of original stories being told in comics form today, it’s hard to imagine a better time to be a comics reader. Online and in print, from all around the world, artists and writers are telling stories with their own voices and styles, and there’s so much to choose from that it’s sometimes difficult to know what to read next. With Should I Be Reading… ?, ComicsAlliance hopes to offer you a guide to some of the best original ongoing comics being published today.

There are a lot of easily-available manga about boys lusting after girls, so it's a blessed relief to find a translated import that centers a teenage dating story on the desire a girl has for a boy. It's reciprocal! But Momokuri lives and dies on its evocation of fifteen year old Kurihara's pre-sexual desire for Momotsuki. These kids are too shy to hold hands or get close enough to take a selfie; the point is, that doesn't negate any of their, or her, yearning.

Days of the Dam isn't hung up on elaborate linework or extravagant character design. In the first two available chapters, it ponders heroism and interpersonal management, and raises some of the ennui that going relentlessly with the flow visits upon our real lives.

The weeks around San Diego are always pretty big for live-action superheroes, but if you were caught up in all the movie news that came out of Comic-Con, you might've missed one of the most interesting announcements of the year. On Tuesday, Ultraman X, this year's iteration of the venerable franchise created by Eiji Tsubaraya, became the first tokusatsu show to ever be broadcast simultaneously in Japan and America, thanks to the Crunchyroll streaming service.

Hey, have you heard about these "Internet Webbed-Comics"? They're like comic books, but on the Information Super-Highway, and they seem to be all the rage with the kids these days. So much so, in fact, that Crunchyroll is hoping that holds true for their new line of original manga, which is set to kick off with Hiroyuki Takahashi and Patrick Macias' Hypersonic Music Club.

Set to launch this Friday, January 30, Hypersonic Music Club will tell the story of "a group of young cyborgs [who] must battle the extra-dimensional monster girls for final control of the enigmatic force known only as…The Mystery Frequency," and that's exactly the combination of manga weirdness and Jack Kirby bombast that gets me interested in checking it out. I mean, really: You had me at extra-dimensional monster girls.

Longtime on-demand anime streaming powerhouse Crunchyroll is entering the "simulpub" manga business in a big way this week with a new monthly digital comics subscription service. The Web, iOS and Android compatible service is kicking off with a set of 12 Kodansha titles translated for English readers in 170 countries the same day the material debuts in its native Japan. The first wave of material in the service includes Attack on Titan, Fairy Tail, Mysterious Girlfriend X, Space Brothers, UQ Holder!, A Town Where You Live, Yamada-Kun and the Seven Witches, My Wife is Wagatsuma-San and Coppelion. What's more, Crunchyroll says even more manga is yet to come.

Webcomics: Artists Kevin Mellon and John Bivens have launched Forest For the Trees, a new weekly webcomic that forces each creator to respond to the other's work on the fly, unaware of what's coming next...

Stan Lee's been busy as ever over the past year, joining forces with a number of publishers to create new properties across a variety of media. Among those projects were a few anime and manga offerings, including "Heroman," which has been in print in Japan's "Monthly ShÅnen Gangan" since September of 2009 and debuted as an anime in April of this year...

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